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Anil Ananthaswamy
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Anil Ananthaswamy
@anilananth
Sci journalist/TED speaker/MIT KSJ Fellow/Books: The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn't There, Through Two Doors at Once / Mastodon: @[email protected]
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anilananthaswamy.com
Joined April 2010
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jun 18, 2024
    Don't know how other authors feel, but seeing the first physical copy of your book, after years of looking at Word files and PDFs... Seems surreal. It's as if someone else wrote it... Anyway, this advance copy arrived in the mail. One more month to pub date
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Dec 31, 2024
    The Theoretical Minimum (for Machine Learning)…And Why Linear Algebra, Calculus, and Probability & Statistics often get mentioned as the minimum math you need to start on your machine learning journey. But why these disciplines? Here’s an intuition for why: Linear Algebra:
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 25, 2025
    Sometime in Dec 2021, I got to talk to Ilya Sutskever, for my book WHY MACHINES LEARN (it was before the ChatGPT era; doubt I'd be able to do so now). Ilya said this about the math of deep learning that he encountered in the first papers he read on the subject (given to him by
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jan 4, 2025
    The Many Moods of Machine Learning If you feel overwhelmed by the jargon of machine learning and wonder how it all ties together, you aren’t alone. There's training vs test data, supervised vs unsupervised vs self-supervised learning, regression vs classification, linear vs
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 9, 2024
    Imagine being 𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐝, even in jest, of being the man who 𝘴𝘦𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘥𝘦𝘦𝘱 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘸𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘴. 𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐂𝐲𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐤𝐨, who proved one of the seminal 𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐱𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐬, showed that a 1-hidden
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 3, 2024
    Before one groks it, 𝐦𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 (𝐌𝐋) can seem abstruse, even for those with software and math backgrounds (I found it so, despite having once learned the necessary skills). But once you get it, the simplicity of the conceptual building blocks is striking.
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jan 6, 2025
    Key Resources for Deeper Dives into AI/ML A number of people have asked about the lectures/courses on AI/ML that I found useful while researching and writing WHY MACHINES LEARN. Here's a redo of an earlier post, with some additions. 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Jul 16, 2024
    There must be a 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐆𝐞𝐫𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 for how authors feel the day their book is released :-) Today is pub date for 𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐍: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘵 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘉𝘦𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘔𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳n 𝘈𝘐. Nearly 4-5 yrs of work in relative obscurity sees
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Aug 21, 2024
    Sometimes, when writing a book, you encounter an idea so mind-bending, it doesn't leave you. For me, it was the answer this question: Why are deep neural networks universal function approximators? Turns out, understanding why functions are vectors is key; it's a truly eye-opening
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Dec 7, 2024
    What? Linear algebra and calculus and machine learning for the holidays! Might a math-y book be a good gift to give someone for the holidays? I hope so :-) “A masterpiece.” —Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel Laureate and Turing Award winner “After just a few minutes of reading Why
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 26, 2024
    The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linear Algebra. If you really want to understand what’s happening in machine learning/AI, coming to grips with the basics of linear algebra is super important. I continue to be blown away by how much of ML becomes increasingly intuitive as one
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 9, 2024
    Some scientists I met and wrote about in 3 of my 4 books have won Nobel Prizes in physics after the book came out :-) The joy of writing about cutting-edge science! Not saying anything more, just in case anyone thinks otherwise. I'm trying to figure out who is most likely to win
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    Oct 8, 2024
    I'm never going to get another chance for this particular humble brag, so I'll take it :-) When Geoff Hinton endorsed WHY MACHINES LEARN sometime back in March/April, my impostor syndrome came to the fore (yes, writers have it too, not just scientists). Surely not, I thought at
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    Anil Ananthaswamy
    @anilananth
    May 14, 2024
    𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐦𝐮𝐦⁣⁣ ⁣⁣ I owe a huge debt to two books that inspired 𝐖𝐇𝐘 𝐌𝐀𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐄𝐒 𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐑𝐍. Leonard Susskind's THE THEORETICAL MINIMUM (for classical mechanics) and Steven Strogatz's 𝐈𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐏𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐒. They are different
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